Mr. Mani (37 page)

—You do?

—Papa, you are wonderful! You honestly would sell everything? You are a man of ideals—a true Zionist—and a most innocent soul...

—Because you are, Papa. Half shrewd businessman and half dreamer. Here, let me give you a kiss...

—No, please! I have not given you a real kiss since coming home...

—Wait—I'm sorry—I did not mean to be rough...

—I will not break your glasses ... here ... one minute, old man...

—But I did not mean to hurt you. All of a sudden you began to pull away...

—I'm sorry, I truly am. It's all right...

—It was not insanely. It was lovingly!

—I am sorry...

—You are right, I have changed ... What time is it?

—No—wait—do not leave me—look, the birth is already over. The bloody pads have been collected and the Swedish midwife has weighed the baby, handed it to its mother, and ushered in the father to see the new soul he has brought into the world—which, if it takes good care of itself, may live to see the tail end of the next century ... This Arab was a man of few words. He looked at his wife, patted her cheek, went back out to untie his donkey, and rode off in the night to his village to get more wives with child.

—Four, I am told.

—No more than four.

—That is the maximum.

—The devil knows. I suppose they fine him—or confiscate the fifth—how should I know? A man who has not even one wife is not the right person to ask.

—No, he lived upstairs. And unlike the clinic, which was quite elaborate and spotlessly clean, the apartment was small and dingy, with an air of poverty about it. The place was poorly lit and full of shadows, and had a central dining room surrounded by little bedrooms piled high with odds and ends and linens. In it was a dinner getting cold because of the prolonged birth—indeed, I could tell by the number of settings on the table that Mani was unexpected too, to say nothing of his guests. By now I regretted not having listened to Linka and gone off to some inn. “I was wrong,” I confessed in a whisper, “terribly wrong—why don't we leave right this minute?” But she hushed me at once, still burning with excitement over the birth that had possessed her whole being. “We mustn't embarrass him,” she said. “He's a sensitive man.” And so we stayed, hesitantly but hungrily led to the table to partake of a meal that was never intended for us. At the table's far end a personage was waiting to meet us. She was Mani's mother, a stately but almost blind woman dressed in black like the Greek peasants I had seen on Crete, who are already in mourning even before anyone has died. Mani hugged her with great fervor, kissed her hand, and introduced her to Linka and me in a Spanish mixed with Arabic. Once more I could see that I was being made out to be a specialist of worldwide repute—and once more he did not neglect to mispronounce Jelleny-Szad. The candles threw flickering shapes on the walls of the dark apartment, and once more I modestly inclined my head to acknowledge the honor accorded me in Jerusalem, taking the stately senora's shriveled hand in my own while she lavishly welcomed me with a radiance that shone through her blindness. This made Linka so jealous that she stepped forward and seized the soft hand too, kissing it devoutly and presenting herself. Sensing the passionateness of the soul that was seeking to take her by storm, the old woman rose and laid a hand on Linka's head to bless her. Nor, so it seemed, would she have released her had not little Mani, having removed his fez and jacket and become a small boy again, elbowed his way between them...

—Only a mother. Dr. Mani never knew his father. He did not even possess a photograph of him. The man died before his son was born, killed in a brawl in an alleyway in the old city. It was Mani's grandfather, his father's father, who—having come especially from Salonika to be with the young couple for the birth—took care of the widow in the first months. And yet instead of taking his grandson and daughter-in-law back to Greece with him, Grandfather Mani chose to leave them in Jerusalem and to return home by himself. Mani never knew him, nor anyone else in his family. He was raised entirely by his mother, a pampered and much-loved only son. These were all things I had already heard at sea, when he and Linka had sat up nights by my bed, ministering to my seasick soul while telling each other stories of their childhoods.

—Ones I had never heard before. Maybe she got them from Mama, or from Grandmother ... or else she simply made them up...

—For example ... for example ... no, Father, this is not the time for it. You still do not grasp that this story is not about us; it is about him—that Sephardic gynecologist—that soft, cunningly naive man who for years was possessed by a passion for self-murder that he concealed so as to scare no one away—whose consummation he put off to heighten the pleasure of choosing the pretext he would use...

—Wait ... First comes the dinner that we crashed, which was by no means a large one but rather an assortment of side dishes—apples, cooked vegetables, pomegranates, bits of fried brain—each little more than a symbol—each a wish—a buffer against fear—a warning to enemies—a desire—a fantasy. None were capable of satisfying—all only made you hungrier. And thus we sat, hardly speaking, Linka and I, listening to the unfamiliar holiday melodies that warbled on and on while saying an occasional “amen” and swallowing symbols—and all this, of course, in five different languages, which the darkness and our own weariness seemed to combine into one.

—Linka and I spoke in Yiddish; the Manis spoke Spanish; Linka and Mani used English; with Mani's wife we tried French; and everything came in a wrapping of Hebrew.

—Mani's wife knows some French. Linka tried talking with her to gauge the extent of her defeat.

—She had been sapped by her husband's fantasies—and being somewhat older than he was, she did not sense the threat that had arrived from abroad, neither then nor in the days that followed. She made no effort to follow our talk. She sat there listening as though to an inner drone in her own soul—and indeed, Linka and I must have seemed mere children to her, slightly older than her own, no doubt—why, we had even finished our schooling!—but children nonetheless, perhaps orphans of some sort who had been entrusted to her husband in Basel as his wards—the proof being that, when it was time to find us a place to sleep, she proposed putting us both in her children's beds, which were in an alcove next to her bedroom. Mani whispered in her ear—Linka and I murmured something or other—and a better solution was found: the girl was moved to the grandmother's bed, Linka was put in the children's room, and young Mani was sent to sleep with me in the clinic. The Swedish midwife was instructed to surround us with partitions and to screen us off from each other.

—Of course. It was a great mistake, Father. We should have gone to a hotel, especially since I had invaded the privacy of that dark, crowded house with its unattractive furnishings quite enough. But now it was Linka who wanted to live on the inside; she was ecstatic with the knowledge that she could go below when she pleased to watch a new birth; and without giving it another thought, she went straight to the children's room, changed into her nightclothes, and climbed into one of the two beds. Shortly after, the rest of the household drifted off to its rooms too, leaving me alone at the dinner table to cut furtive slices of the remaining hallah, since I was as hungry at the end of that symbolic meal as I had been when it started. I heard Mani climbing the stairs, no doubt thrilled by the thought that his latest love had become a little girl who slept on the other side of the wall from him I did not wait for him but went in to see her and found her in bed, glowing, her eyes wide open, a large, colorful Turkish doll—a sort of belly dancer in silk pants—above her head, on which she wore a Turkish fez in place of a bonnet. “Forgive me, Linka,” I said to her. “I was wrong—tomorrow we will find other lodgings and move out of here.” She sat bolt upright. She was already burned by the Palestinian sun. “But there's no need,” she murmured. “It's not that at all. There is lots of room here—we must not hurt his feelings—he cares for us dearly. I'm telling you, I know—let him play the host.” I said nothing. I could feel her inner tumult, her new hope that had sprung from seeing his wife and children for herself. I sat down on her bed and tried to say something solemn—something about our journey having come to an end—but
could not think of the words. “Well, then,” I said, “here we are in Jerusalem at last.” “Yes,” she replied at once. “Here we are. How happy I am!” It was the most simple, the most touching declaration—all the more so for having been made in that down-at-the-heels little room, surrounded by a confusion of children's things—for having been so perfectly forthright. “How happy I am!” I smiled at her indulgently. I knew that her happiness had nothing to do with Jerusalem—of which she had so far seen nothing—and everything to do with something else; it was no more than an amusing illusion, I thought, that would soon come to naught. “And you, Efrayim?” she asked earnestly, too big for that child's bed that was gazed down on by the Turkish doll. “Are you happy?” I laughed. “Happy? As if happiness were possible for me—as if there ever has been a time when I was happy. Happy for what? For that premature baby? For being here? We have nine days to see this place and then we had better get ourselves safely home, because I promised Mama and Papa to return you in no worse condition than I took you in.” She frowned at that. “Of course, of course,” she murmured short-temperedly, “we shall see.” I had the feeling that she was listening to something outside the door—to our host, Dr. Mani, who was standing there eavesdropping—portlier than ever in an open shirt, minus his jacket and tie—waiting bleary-eyed to take me down to my quarters, where the indefatigable midwife had made my bed. She had washed and changed clothes too, and she greeted me affably in bare feet and showed me to my bed, which was set apart from the women's beds but not by much, as if some obscure formula had determined its position vis-a-vis them. Next to it, behind a partition, was little Mani, who had not yet settled down for the night; he was standing on his bed in a black shift, the sort of tunic that Arab children run about in, and now he ran to his father unrestrainedly, pulling him away from me and behind his partition, where he clung to him with both arms. I could hear him scolding him in that Spanish of theirs, which is rather like a watered-down Latin. Here he had been waiting long months for him, pining away—and what does the man do when he finally comes home but show up with two monopolizing strangers! I could sense the doctor's impatience; his answers were brusque, for he wished only to be upstairs again, in the little room where his new daughter was lying. It was then, without warning, that the boy broke out crying bitterly, in a dry, harsh sob that raided the silence in the clinic. It was an inconsolable sound. I rose and went over to him—he stopped crying and hung his head angrily—and so I turned to Mani and chided him for forgetting the most important thing of all. The black horse! “You see,” I said to the boy, “your father wished to bring you a horse.” At first he would not listen but merely pressed his nose against the wall and waited for me to go away, only half-understanding my Polish Hebrew. Little by little, however, the story enchanted him; he began peeking over his shoulder to watch me describe with my hands how the gray sack was tied around the horse's head, and how it was eased into the hold of the ship, and how it behaved so wildly there that it had to be disembarked in Crete and galloped off to the freedom of the mountains. The boy's tears dried; he was listening intently now, asking his father the meaning of words that eluded him; at last, his sorrow once more got the best of him. “But where is that island?” he asked, quite desolate to think that the horse was in Crete when it might have been in Jerusalem. “Can't we go there and bring it back?” he begged. Mani translated for me, and I promised that on our way home we would ransom the horse from the island and send it to Palestine. That gradually calmed the boy down enough to go to bed. A prematurely old little child!

—Yosef was his name. Since Beirut a day has not passed without my thinking of him. Even here, in this dark corner—in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from Jerusalem—I feel a physical pain when I mention him, as if I had been shot. Does he know yet that his father is dead? And what else does he know? I picture him roaming past the mirrors and partitions of the clinic, which must be slowly going to pot, hating and blaming Linka, but also me. Is he capable of making a distinction between us? Will he ever understand that we were only an instrument in his father's hands, a wretched pretext for a profound passion that I must fumblingly grope to comprehend for the rest of my life—that we too were the victims of...

—Go back where?

—When? How?

—What, all over again?

—No, no. I have already been there—I have had enough—it is someone else's turn...

—But what? In what language? What could I write? What could I say that would not make his anguish only worse?

—No, Father, no. It is a bad idea.

—Money? What kind of money?

—For what? It would be an implicit admission of guilt ... why should I make it?

—But what guilt? What are you talking about, Father? I ask you: what? You have taken leave of your senses! What guilt?

—No, wait—wait—don't leave me, Father. Father ... wait—wait—I beg you—don't leave me to toss and turn in bed all night as I did that first night in Jerusalem—a Jerusalem I already was in and had not even entered yet. All I had seen of it was that lone, amazing clinic and the stars in its sky—which nevertheless were enough to make me realize that I too—but why should I not be?—was almost happy, even if I would never have admitted it to Linka—happy that the earth was not rocking beneath me and that I could turn my thoughts away from my heaving insides and back to the world again—to the voices I now heard—to the quiet steps and whispers above me—to the soft, barefoot movements of the Swedish midwife—who, it seemed, never slept—as she made the rounds of her sleeping prepartums to see which of them would be next. I lay there for a while like a doctor on night duty; rose to ask the Swede for a stethoscope to listen to the newborn baby's heart; returned to my bed; gazed out the window at the fading stars while watching the darkness slowly lift; and listened to the unexpected sounds of the dawn—at first the sweet ring of a church bell, as if the little church of St. Jodwiga of Oświ[ecedil]cim. had followed us to Jerusalem, and then, close on its heels, the clear voices of the muezzins...